I don't think we can easily argue that "it this was good, people would have done it long time ago". Culture changes slowly, and people don't always make the best decisions.
The culture of "I want to make more money than my competitor" doesn't need to change. I can easily argue that if switching to remote work, in and of itself, were to produce clear, repeatable productivity gains that consistently outweighed the downsides, companies would switch to it very quickly.
In that case, the easy money would be in selling remote-work consulting to businesses that want help implementing it. The results would largely depend on the quality of the people jumping onto that particular bandwagon.
Can you argue that a company that wants to try remote, but doesn't know where to start, can consistently achieve measurable gains by employing such consultants?
That element seems to be what killed the positive momentum behind Agile. If the same people end up doing the same things, remote work will likely become just as dysfunctional as local in-office work, if not more so. Companies will buy just enough rope to hang themselves from people who will even gleefully tie the slip knot for them.
